They Didn’t Expect to Feel Hope About Privacy Again. Then They Walked Into This Room.

Naomi Brockwell
Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:04:27 +0000

This Is What It Looks Like When a New Civil Rights Movement Starts by
Accident

I just got back from Cypherpunk Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and I wish everyone could have seen what I saw.

In a world that feels increasingly tracked, logged, and profiled, this was a reminder that the privacy movement is very much alive. And it’s growing.

What Is Cypherpunk Congress?

Cypherpunk Congress is a gathering of people who still believe privacy is worth fighting for. It brought together 3000 people from around the world. Hackers. Cryptographers. Decentralization die-hards. Builders who care about human freedom. People who want to make sure the internet stays accessible for everyone.

I go to a lot of conferences, and each has its strengths and its blind spots. Some crypto events focus overly on markets and price, and some hacker conferences lean strongly towards policy solutions instead of individual empowerment.

Cypherpunk Congress felt refreshingly different. It embraced the idea that technology can shift power back to the individual, and it made every person there feel like they had a role to play. Those who attended remember why this entire cypherpunk movement started in the first place. And the speaker lineup was incredible, back-to-back heroes who have spent decades building real tools for real freedom.

We heard from the creator of Tor, co-founder of Ethereum, the creator of IPFS and founder of one of the largest decentralized storage networks, and leaders from all kinds of organizations fighting major legal battles for digital freedom. Each speaker had a call to action, talked about the dangers ahead if we stay on our current trajectory, and explored the ways we’re empowered to build the tools that can actually protect us.

Privacy Used To Be The Default

At the event, I hosted a fireside chat with Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum. One of the things we spoke about was how we’ve always taken privacy for granted, and not realized it was something we needed to defend.

Here’s what I mean:

In the modern digital era, privacy rights have been decimated compared to what they used to be. They have been stripped away, over the course of several decades, one tiny step at a time. Our private conversations are now logged and analyzed, our locations tracked, what we read, watch, search for, or buy is recorded in enormous detail. Even the causes we support, people we follow, things we like online are all linked back to us.

The total surveillance of our most intimate activities crept in slowly without people noticing, and now it’s completely normalized. Like a frog in boiling water.

Having all our private activities tracked wasn’t always the status quo. We used to have privacy baked in by default to most of our daily activities. In an essay titled “Why I Support Privacy”, Vitalik wrote:

“In the 19?? century, the average conversation happened once, via voice, and was never recorded by anyone. For this reason: the entire moral panic around ‘going dark’ is ahistorical. The average conversation, and even financial transaction, being fully and unconditionally private is the multi-thousand-year historical norm.”

He’s right. For most of human history, privacy was simply how the world worked. Conversations faded into thin air, movements weren’t tracked, reading habits and personal beliefs belonged to the individual, and privacy was the default.

We’re living through the first moment in recent memory where privacy isn’t automatic, and has to be defended.

Because privacy used to be effortless, it never developed the kind of cultural vocabulary that people use for things they know how to defend. There’s no inherited instinct for it, no generational memory of needing to protect it, no stories about what happens when it disappears.

So when people say, “I don’t care about privacy,” it’s usually not apathy, but unfamiliarity. They’re describing a gap in experience: They’ve never lived in a world where their privacy was at risk, so they’ve never had to form an opinion about it. They assume the old defaults still exist, even though those defaults have been dismantled. Their inherent need for privacy is there, but it just hasn’t been activated, because the threat is new in a way that’s hard to see.

We’re asking people to defend something they never previously needed to protect, and something they always assumed was woven into everyday life. That’s why this fight feels strange and abstract to so many. It’s not a lack of caring, but a lack of practice.

A New Movement

The fight for privacy is intrinsically hard, because we have to create a movement from scratch. But what I saw at Cypherpunk Congress was the beginning of that movement. People have already woken up to how far privacy has eroded, and now they’re joining together and mobilizing. They’re tired of complacency and tired of watching surveillance swallow more of our lives each year.

What struck me most was how serious and grounded the event felt. People weren’t there to posture. They were working on tools, protocols, infrastructure, and legal strategies aimed at strengthening privacy in the real world. Most of the conversations focused on how far the internet has drifted from its original ideals, and on the work happening to pull it back into something that respects human freedom. There were so many people across completely different backgrounds, who all arrived at the same conclusion: privacy is essential to a free society, and it’s up to us to write a better future.

Vitalik has been a clear voice in this shift, making privacy a huge focus for the Ethereum community, and he’s become one of the most eloquent voices in privacy advocacy. If you haven’t read his essay from April, you should.

Keep an eye on our channel for my fireside with him once it’s uploaded, and check out the Web3Privacy channel as well -- every talk from the conference is worth watching.

Why This Matters

We often hear that privacy is dead.
That surveillance is too big to fight.
That young people don’t care.
That no one wants to use privacy tools.

Cypherpunk Congress showed the opposite.

There is a thriving global community building privacy tech.
I saw thousands of people who still care about civil liberties enough to travel across the world and congregate at a conference together.
There are organizations, developers, researchers, and activists who refuse to let the surveillance state win.

The cypherpunk ethos is returning with a clarity and urgency that feels long overdue.

Cypherpunk Congress reminded me that the future is not written. We get to shape it. And if this community keeps building, privacy has a real shot.

The conference felt like the start of something big. Mark my words, this is a movement with momentum, and a battle that’s about to get a lot more intense.

We’re going to need as many people as possible on our side. Get ready to fight. Many of us are already assembled, and we’re going to need you.